A California megafire overwhelmed even some of the best preparations. What’s next?

COHASSET, Calif. – Yahmo Ahqha thought he was safer than ever in his cabin in the forested Northern California foothills, where the Sierra Nevada meets the Cascades. As safe as he could be, at least.

Controlled burns removed dense underbrush across more than a dozen acres around his home over the past year or two. Intentionally setting low-intensity fires to clear forest floors of flame-fueling vegetation is a primary strategy to slow and weaken potential fires in the West – and offer some peace of mind in a place where trauma lingers from the 2018 Camp fire’s devastation in nearby Paradise.

But when a wildfire alert to Ahqha’s phone last week interrupted an intense video game battle with his 9-year-old son, his sense of security was pierced. A blaze had ignited in nearby Chico, at the edge of the valley floor. When he swung open the door to the old hunting cabin, he saw smoke pouring directly overhead.

The pair escaped before what became known as the Park fire exploded into what experts say may be California’s fastest-moving wildfire on record, and so far its fifth largest. While the flames somehow skirted much of the ridge Ahqha called home, leaving a store, a school, a community center and many homes untouched, they reduced Ahqha’s cabin to a pile of barely recognizable rubble.

The latest Western conflagration has residents like Ahqha asking: What if the best fire prevention is still not enough to stop a megafire?

Cohasset fared far better than Paradise, with prevention efforts creating buffers that probably kept the Park fire’s flames from leaping to many homes, inspiring calls for much more of the so-called “good fire” of prescribed burns. But its ferocity and size demonstrated how even the best strategies to confront fire may be failing to match blazes that veteran firefighters said are burning hotter and spreading faster than ever, even when they cross some fire-breaking burn scars.

“We never had fires like this,” Mark Brunton, a battalion chief and operations section chief for Cal Fire, told the Washington Post at a Park fire command center in Chico.

Nearly a week after the fire ignited, spots of hot earth still smoldered around where Ahqha’s cabin once stood. A mangled half of a door. An overturned claw-foot tub. A charred typewriter. Only the metal disc golf baskets in the yard appeared untouched.

The 39-year-old musician wonders if enough could ever be done to keep his family safe. After the Camp fire, Ahqha, whose legal name is Erik Rydberg but goes by his tribal name, did whatever he could to help neighbors in Paradise, where he lived as a child.

“Now I’m on the other end of it,” he said.

The Park fire demonstrates how years, if not decades, of weather patterns in a changing climate can converge to send flames raging through remote wilderness and mountain outposts at shocking speeds.

Historic drought left trees weakened or dead. Stormy winters washed debris into piles, while the rain allowed combustible grasses to thrive. Intense heat, smashing records across California this summer, dried everything out.

And then, there is the element of randomness in where fire moves after it ignites. Like most wildfires, Park was sparked by human activity. A witness saw a man push a burning car down a hill near a popular swimming hole in Chico’s Upper Bidwell Park, though the suspect told authorities it was an accident, according to local reports.

With winds flowing from the south, that meant flames fanned into some pristine and densely forested wilderness in Lassen National Forest, toward the southernmost peak of the Cascade range of volcanoes. The same treacherous terrain that made the area’s Ishi Wilderness a refuge for native Yahi people – a man named Ishi was the last of the tribe to remain there – allowed the fire to rapidly consume the rugged landscape.

Ecologists had hoped parts of the wilderness had experienced enough fire that they could weather the burn. One ponderosa forest studied for decades, known as Beaver Creek Pinery, was thought to be a prime example of a fire-tolerant and healthy forest, and scientists had been planning a prescribed burn in the area to see how it would fare.

But other parts of the forest had no known fire history in a century of recordkeeping. That made it much easier for the fire to spread and fueled extreme plumes that created towering infernos that firefighters could hardly battle.

“One might think, well, is there any area of California that hasn’t burned?” said Eric Knapp, a research ecologist for the U.S. Forest Service in Redding, Calif. “But there are still vast landscapes that have seen far too little fire.”

In these extensive forested lands that haven’t burned for decades, vegetation has built up to levels that could fuel hotter fires, Knapp said. Though attitudes around beneficial fire are changing, risks of huge wildfires remain heightened because, for decades, the country’s firefighting approach was to put out every new blaze as fast as possible.

In California, prescribed burns treated a record-high 63,878 acres through June 24, according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture Forest Service. But Stanford University research has shown the need for such burns or other vegetation thinning across nearly 20 million acres of the Golden State, about 20% of its footprint.

“There’s still a lot of work to do to deal with 100-plus years of accumulated fuels,” Knapp said. “You have a changing climate on top of it, and you have a summer like the one we’ve had. … It just leads to an extreme type of fire.”

Closer to the ignition site at the Big Chico Creek Ecological Reserve, environmentalists spent years meticulously working to prepare the land for fire, using chain saws and controlled burns to thin vegetation while promoting natural biodiversity, said Miranda Kokoszka, assistant director of the Butte Environmental Council. Reserve staff also began offering forest therapy for survivors of the Camp fire that killed 85 people. But the Park fire was already so intense by the time it reached the reserve that it made little difference, she said. Fire destroyed a reserve office and a historic barn, and probably did extensive damage to the landscape.

“We were doing all the work we could,” Kokoszka said. “We were not prepared for this at all, even though we thought we were.”

Firefighters once considered scars from past fires a more reliable backstop: For at least the first few years after a blaze, vegetation is light, meaning there is little to burn. But intensifying fire conditions mean some no longer ensure a fire break.

If the Park fire continues to spread to the northeast, it could soon encounter the scar left by another of California’s biggest wildfires on record, the 2021 Dixie fire. Depending on where it reaches that burn scar, the Park fire could stop in its tracks: After three years, much of the area is still a “moonscape” with nothing to burn, said David Mitchell, a volunteer firefighter who oversees prescribed burns across Butte County, which includes Cohasset, Chico and Paradise.

But in some parts of the Dixie scar, Brunton said, there are beds of fuel it left behind. The intensity of fires like the Dixie and Park fires can kill so many trees, they leave scars that end up feeding a cycle of severe fire, scientists said.

Trees have evolved to survive moderate fires and even come out of them stronger. But when fires burn so hot that they kill trees across thousands of contiguous acres, that can leave the landscape even more prone to severe fires, said Scott Stephens, a professor at the University of California at Berkeley who studies fire ecology. Downed dead trees can fuel fires for longer and keep them burning hotter.

Any fire that spreads as quickly and burns as hot as the Park fire is capable of setting a bad cycle of blazes in motion, he said.

“You’re in a loop that’s hard to get out of,” Stephens said.

That the communities of Cohasset and Forest Ranch, another foothill town in the line of the Park fire, did not see the same level of devastation as Paradise was surprising and encouraging, said Addison Winslow, a Chico city council member. He returned to his hometown after the 2018 Camp fire, which was perhaps equal parts terrifying and galvanizing here.

Chico voters approved a 1% sales tax in 2022, and some of the proceeds have funded fire resiliency work, Winslow said.

But there are already questions about whether it was enough. Zeke Lunder, a Chico resident and wildfire and fuels management expert, quickly pointed to an overgrowth of invasive thistle near the Park fire ignition site that Chico could have reduced with a prescribed burn, as it recently had in other parts of Upper Bidwell Park.

That didn’t happen, Winslow said, in part because some residents are leery of any flames, even controlled ones, and because there is simply so much fire preparation to be done.

“It didn’t happen because we’ve been stretched thin,” Winslow said. “We don’t have the resources to do everything. It’s a lesson.”

Around Cohasset, at least, there are some signs that prescribed burns and other work to reduce fire fuels were successful in defending the community. Cal Fire data showed nearly two thirds of structures inspected within the Park fire as of Friday morning had survived without damage. Stephens called the share “quite high,” but that still left “terrible outcomes” for so many residents, he added.

Cohasset remained mostly closed off this week, so residents and fire experts said more investigation was needed to learn how structures stayed intact and which fire prevention efforts may have succeeded.

But for residents like Ahqha, there was evidence of failure. After evacuating with his son, he monitored the fire-tracking app Watch Duty as the flames approached the Cohasset ridge and then overtook it. A neighbor whose house made it through unscathed and was allowed to briefly return shared a picture of Ahqha’s home from a distance – vehicles ablaze and no sign of the cabin.

As a member of Northern California’s Pomo nation, Ahqha said he sees the value in controlled, low-intensity burns like the ones that cleared the ridge around his home. His ancestors used fire to maintain the landscape for centuries, and he agrees with calls to treat forests with more good fire.

But if wildfires keep outmatching preparations, then what? He isn’t sure.

“It just keeps happening out here,” Ahqha said. “Will it ever be safe, really?”